Class, Neoliberal Capitalism in Crisis and the Resistant and Transformative Role of Education and Knowledge Workers

This chapter calls for transformative activism by education and other cultural workers - teachers, lecturers, journalists - in order to develop an economically just economy, polity and society. This chapter sets out key characteristics of neo-liberal global capitalism (and,importantly, its accompanying neoconservatism) and its major effects on society and education. It highlights the obscene and widening economic, social and educational inequalities both within states and, globally, between states; the de- theorisation of education and the regulating of critical thought and activists through the ideological and repressive state apparatuses; and the limitation and regulation of democracy and democratic accountability at national and local educational levels. The chapter analyses three components of the `Capitalist Agenda for/in Education' within the current neo-liberal /neo-conservative globalising project of Capital, and, calls for critical engagement with- challenging- the Radical Right in its neoliberal, Conservative, neoconservative, traditionalist religious, and its social democratic (sometimes revised as `Third way') manifestations. The chapter also calls for engagement with ideological and cultural fashions and with fashionable `knowledge workers’ within the media and the academy -fashions such as postmodernism, which, together with social democracy/ left revisionism, ultimately serve the function of `naturalising' neo-liberal Capital as the dominating `common sense'. They do this partly by virtue of their ignoring, or deriding Marxist derived/related concepts of social class, class conflict and socialism. Such academic fashions as postmodernism and left revisionism debilitate and displace viable solidaristic socialist counter-hegemonic struggles.